What Is Color Balance In Photos: Theory Made Super Simple
Careful color balance showcases colored light illuminating an iceberg in Ilulissat, Greenland.
Color balance is a fundamental aspect of photography. My own, extensive exploration of color balance has deeply affected how I perceive and photograph the world around me. Let me share that knowledge, showcased with images from Greenland and China, to demonstrate how control over color balance will positively impact the success of your photos.
Color balance helps a photographer determine the overall color rendering of a photo, along a warm/cool color axis, through adjustments to white balance settings in camera. Depending upon the desired outcome, either a neutral color balance or a more emotionally charged image will result.
This post explores how to use white balance settings, from within your camera’s menu, to achieve the most desirable result, whether that be neutral color balance or an image that uses the color of the light to evoke mood, feeling or atmosphere.
Table of Contents:
Color Balance Versus White Balance
Recording colors as neutral as possible, without any color cast, is often considered important to achieving the desired result. White balance settings are adjusted, in camera, to allow you to achieve a neutral color balance in your photos.
However, as is the case with sunset photos, many images benefit from the emotionally transforming color of light. In circumstances like that it’s best to take control of white balance, taking your camera off Auto White Balance (AWB) and opting for the most appropriate manual white balance setting.
That’s one example where, rather than trying to neutralize the color of the light, via Auto White Balance, a better image will likely result by accurately recording or even amplifying the color balance of the scene in question.
Color Balance Under The Midnight Sun
From my own experience, photographing under the midnight sun does introduce some potential difficulties, one of which is achieving the most appropriate color balance.
Greenland is a wild, remote and very beautiful country. And the landscapes of Greenland, particularly under the midnight sun, are absolutely epic.
I spent around a week in Western Greenland, most of it in the tourist town of Ilulissat, on the edge of the fabulous Ilulissat Icefjord and Disko Bay.
The above photo was made during an overnight hike I undertook around the town of Ilulissat from around 9pm till about 5am the following morning.
Color Contrast and Composition
The Ilulissat Icefjord is magnificent and the colors produced by the midnight sun can be quite surreal. It's also vast and quite difficult to photograph.
The icebergs are huge, some of them the size of large city buildings, and often so crowded together that it can be difficult to achieve a sense of scale and three dimensional space in the photos you make.
In the case of the photo at the top of this post I was careful to position myself to emphasize important foreground, mid ground and background elements within the frame.
The inclusion of foreground subject matter allowed me to emphasize contrast between the following compositional elements within the scene:
Light and dark
Smooth and textured
Warm and cool colors
Likewise, the little patches of green grass in the rocky foreground contrast nicely with the soft pink colors in the distant ice and sky.
Understanding Color Balance
Icebergs can sometimes exhibit a strong cyan or aqua color cast. However, in this case the color of the icebergs is largely due to light reflecting from the sky above and behind me.
You'll notice that it's in the shaded areas of the icebergs where the cyan colored sky is reflected.
And why should shadows on icebergs be any different to those falling on grass, rock, clothing or skin? To help understand how the color of light affects the color of the landscape, it’s good to remember the following:
The color of shaded areas within the scene are influenced by the color of the sky that's being reflected into them.
This is the reason why sunlit grass may photograph yellow/green in color while an adjacent, shaded area of the same grass will reflect light from a blue sky and, as a consequence, photograph bluer in color.
Does the bluish color balance of this Ilulissat iceberg challenge your perception?
Color Perception and Reality In Photography
So why is it that most folks don't perceive such changes in color in the world around them?
Why do most folks perceive a traditional white wedding dress, photographed in the shade under a clear blue sky, as being white when, in fact, it's not?
“Our brain stores memories of how we believe things should look. Such memories affect the way we perceive similar subject matter under quite different colored light when, in reality, it looks quite different.”
At best the appearance of the wedding dress has shifted to a cool white, due to the bluish color of the sky that's being reflected into it.
This is also why, without the appropriate white balance being set, the wedding dress will usually photograph as a cool, rather than a neutral, white.
To help understand this phenomena it’s good to remember the following:
We see the cooler, bluish white
We're emotionally effected by it
However, we don't quite believe it, so our brain neutralizes the color that we see which impacts on how we remember it
This is just one way by which our perception of the world around us causes us to create our own reality.
Our brain is constantly trying to white balance most scenes so as to make the world around us look more neutral in color. This allows us to realign what we see to more closely match our perception of how things should actually look.
You don’t have to be a Buddhist to realize that what we commonly refer to as reality is, largely, a construct created by the human brain.
How To Photograph Incandescent Light
Have you ever photographed a kitchen or bedroom at night under incandescent (i.e., tungsten) lighting?
Let's say the kitchen is full of white goods and has white bench tops and a white tiled floor.
Will those white areas actually photograph a neutral white or will they be adversely affected by a color cast emitted from the artificial yellow/orange colored incandescent lighting?
It all depends on the white balance to which the camera has been set.
Auto White Balance
Auto White Balance (AWB) will usually do a pretty good job neutralizing the strong yellow/orange color that’s cast from incandescent light sources.
Likewise, manually setting your camera's white balance to incandescent (i.e., Tungsten on a Canon or Olympus camera) should also do a good job under these circumstances.
That is, assuming it's night time and the only light source your camera has to deal with is incandescent.
If it's dusk and you have a combination of cool blue light from outside mixing, in relatively equal proportions, with the warm incandescent light inside then it's considerably harder to achieve a neutral white balance.
Under these conditions, with Auto White Balance activated, your camera will try to correct for the color of one light source thereby amplifying the color of the other.
This problem is manipulated to positive effect in a lot of real estate photography, with photos made around dusk. The result is a room that looks quite naturally lit while the world outside, seen through one or more windows, seems unusually blue.
“I’ve Done My Time in the Kitchen at Parties. ”
However, opting for AWB in my photos of the gigantic icebergs in Greenland’s Ilulissat Icefjord would not have been a good idea. If I had one of the following would likely have happened:
The subtle pink hue of the sky and sunlit icebergs would have become more vivid in color and, as a consequence the cyan colors in the shaded areas of the icebergs and foreground rocks would have been significantly diminished.
The cyan hue reflected into the shaded areas of the icebergs and foreground rocks would have been emphasized and, as a consequence, the subtle pink hue in the sky and sunlit icebergs would have been diminished.
It is true that, under certain circumstances, one of the above options may have produced a better result. However, this image isn’t simply a photo of a bunch of icebergs squashed together.
It’s also an exploration of the color of light and how that challenges our perception of the world around us. With this in mind I was eager to showcase the variations in color throughout the scene.
The problem is that, except for a few basic situations, camera’s don’t recognise subject. They might be able to identify a particular series of shapes as belonging to a face. Likewise, they can be trained to locate an eye and focus on it.
However, when it comes to easily identifying a specific eye within a group of people or from within a crowded urban environment, your camera often needs to be directed to locate the person and the specific eye (i.d., left or right) in question to achieve critical focus.
But the term subject doesn’t just relate to people, flowers, mountains or cats. The photos in this post are, primarily, about color and the relationship between colors.
From that point of view color is actually the subject of these images, and the neutralizing effect of auto white balance would be problematic as it would have prevented me from exploring that very relationship.
If you’re interesting in learning more about the notion of subject in photography I highly recommend you take a look at my posts titled What Is Subject Matter In Photography? and How To Photograph Unconventional Subject Matter.
Camera’s Daylight white balance reveals incandescent light is yellow/orange in color.
Color balance and Emotion
Because of the emotional impact color has on our perception of the world around us I believe that the contrast between warm and cool colors often makes great subject matter in our photos.
To this end it’s important to remember that, in addition to variations in the color of subjects within the scene, the palette photographers get to play with is enhanced by variations in the color of the light.
Photography is a celebration of light and I feel light should be one of the main considerations that affect what I photograph and how I compose my images.
Take a look at the above iPhone image of a rain damaged window blind and surrounding wall in my bedroom. There are two distinctly different color temperatures in this scene.
Can you see the heavy yellowish color of the interior lighting contrasting with the intense blue light of dawn, visible through the gap between blind and window frame?
It's fascinating, don't you think? And it’s not bad for an old iPhone X camera.
With my current Sony Alpha 1 mirrorless camera I’d achieve the same color balance by manually setting a Daylight white balance. Doing so would also reveal that incandescent light is yellow/orange in color.
Why? Because that's the setting that effectively turns the camera's white balance off and allows you to accurately record the actual color of the light under which you're photographing.
Making the very same photo with the Auto White Balance setting engaged would have produced a very different result.
As most of the image is yellow in color the camera, thinking the world is not supposed to be yellow, would have added blue to neutralize the yellow color of the light illuminating the window blind and wall.
That would have resulted in a more neutral, though not particularly interesting interior and an even more intensely blue strip of light emanating from a stormy dawn sky.
That might well be the kind of result you’d prefer for certain types of film stills, real estate and wedding photography, but if your photo is all about a study of the color of light then my approach works best.
Your camera doesn’t know you’re photographing under incandescent light, sunrise, sunset, etc. Sometimes that’s why it will neutralize color and, at the same time, strip away the emotional impact the color of light brings to the image.
You can’t fully understand light until you learn to see the changing color of light and how it affects our perception of reality.
Photographers, like painters, who gain an appreciation for the color of light are able to observe changes in light in an emotionally charged and quite profound manner.
Incandescent lighting influences the color balance of the Fairmont Peace Hotel lobby.
Color Balance And Seeing Color
This photo of a fantastically detailed mural in the foyer of the Fairmont Peace Hotel in Shanghai, China displays a definite yellow/orange color cast. That’s because it was made, at night, under predominantly incandescent illumination.
I did, in fact, reduce the color caste somewhat so that the visible light sources in the scene appeared white, while still maintaining the overall warmth in the scene. I hope this portrays the sense of nostalgia I felt visiting this lovely hotel.
To get a better understanding of incandescent light try making a few photos in the kitchen at night, without the flash, and with your camera set to a Sunny (i.e., Daylight or Direct Daylight on Nikon cameras) white balance.
In doing so you'll effectively be turning white balance off and, thereby, allowing the camera to actually record the true color of the light present in the environment in which you're working.
Depending upon the exact color temperature of the lights in question, you can expect a very yellow or yellow/orange result.
But why would you do such a thing?
Simply as a learning exercise to allow you to see the actual color of the light under which you're making photos.
By doing so you'll begin to prove to yourself that your own perception of reality is flawed, in this case by the brain effectively white balancing (i.e., neutralizing) the color of the light under which you're making your photos.
Color temperature is an amazing gift for the color photographer. But before we can work with it we first need to understand it.
And to do that we have to begin to see the actual color of the light and how it effects the world around us.
It's an amazing journey and there's hardly a day goes by without me marveling at the changing color of light throughout the day and from one side of the street to the other.
Color Balance With Film
In the days of film-based photography, particularly with color transparency (i.e., slide) film, you could employ an 80A Color Conversion filter in front of your camera’s lens to neutralize the color emitted from incandescent lights.
For scenes where the color of the light was not so extreme a more subtle deviation from white or neutral colored light would occur.
Back then I'd employ one of a range of Light Balancing filters. My favorite was the 81B filter, which remained on my camera in place of a UV or Skylight filter, for almost all of my outdoor photography.
These days I often set the white balance on my Sony Alpha 1 camera to Cloudy to achieve a similar result when photographing under predominantly daylight lighting conditions, including portraits made with window light.
“Cloudy is the setting to which, more often than not, I set white balance on my camera when photographing under daylight conditions.”
Incidentally, I used the same setting on previous DSLR cameras I’ve owned, including the following:
Nikon D800e
Canon 5D and 5D Mark II
Leica M9
It’s a simple option to set on your camera and, more often than not, it’ll help you produce great color photos. Why not give it a try?
Under certain circumstances the Cloudy white balance still won't neutralize all of the bluish light. In that case set your camera to the even stronger Shade white balance setting.
White Balance is a significant factor determining the success of your photos. I’ve written a great post that lists all of the important white balance settings in your camera and under what conditions I recommend you employ them.
The post is titled White Balance Explained and I’m sure you’ll find it to be a fantastic and highly useful resource.
Coming to grips with the information in that post will, once and for all, put you in control of white balance and allow you to make photos under a range of different lighting conditions with a greater degree of confidence.
House, glowing in the warm color balance of sunrise, in Ilulissat, Greenland.
Correct Or Appropriate Color Balance
This article is focused around what's referred to as correct white balance. But, perhaps, it’s worthwhile pausing for a moment to examine what’s meant or implied by the word correct.
There’s an inherent assumption that you want to neutralize the color of the light so that things photograph the way most folks expect them to, at least in relation to color.
And then there’s the question as to what’s meant by correct when it comes to color balance.
My photo of a house in the tourist town of Ilulissat in western Greenland is interesting in that the color balance you see is actually quite correct, given that the image was made at sunrise.
However, if the image was made at midday it would be reasonable to expect a more neutral color balance, as that would reflect most people’s perception of the color of light at that time of day.
Can you imagine getting out of bed for an early morning sunrise photography session in Greenland only to have the camera neutralize the color of the warm light in your photos.
Understanding how to control the white balance settings in your camera will prevent that from happening.
But sometimes you need to be more concerned about achieving a white balance that's appropriate to the scene you're photographing and the mood you're trying to evoke from your audience.
It's also worth noting that, while the notion of correct white balance is often desirable for portrait, architecture and landscape photos, the decision to apply an appropriate white balance may produce a more emotive and visually compelling result.
That’s because color can be used to enhance mood. And sometimes mood is more important than neutral rendition of color. Wouldn’t you agree?
If you have any doubt think about how disappointed you’d be if you got up early and photographed a spectacular sunrise, only to be disappointed at the lacklustre color that your camera produced when set to Auto White Balance (AWB).
Daylight white balance provided good color balance for this late afternoon portrait.
Best Color Balance For Portrait photos
This image of a group of elderly women dancing under warm, late afternoon light in the grounds of the Temple Of Heaven in Beijing, China is a good example of how important good color balance is when it comes to achieving a pleasing result in portrait photography.
I'm Caucasian and the color of my skin is quite pinkish. Some folks have olive colored skin, some have brownish colored skin and some yellowish colored skin.
Sometimes these colors indicate our ethnicity, but there are substantial differences in skin color within individual ethnicities or races including those of Caucasian folk.
What’s more, as we age, variations in pigmentation often occur across our face resulting in blotchy coloration on the face and other areas of skin that have been frequently exposed to sunlight during our life.
My point is that we all have color in our skin. It’s neither good nor bad, it’s just there. However, depending upon the strength of color, it might need to be dealt with when making a photo that’s pleasing to the subject.
There must be many, many photos of young babies and teenagers who, years later, wish their skin wasn’t quite so red.
Over the years I found that many digital cameras often amplify skin color. Generally speaking that’s not a good thing, regardless of the ethnicity of the person you’re photographing.
If the primary subject of your image is a portrait then it's important to consider whether it's appropriate to be warming up the color of the light with a Cloudy or Shade white balance as that may result in overly warm skin reproduction.
Because of racism a lot of folks are, quite reasonably, self-conscious of how their skin reproduces in photos.
If you sense that this is likely to be an issue you might consider opting for the Sunny/Daylight/Direct Daylight balance on your camera so as to reduce the warmth of your subject’s skin in the photos you make.
In such circumstances you'll usually find that the success of the image is more likely going to be dependent upon the reproduction of your subject’s skin than the color of the surrounding environment.
The image of the elderly ladies dancing was made with late afternoon light. The warm brown color of their skin was enhanced by the yellowish light of the late afternoon light.
Not wanting the women’s skin color to reproduce too warm I set my camera to the Daylight white balance setting. The result is successful, for their skin and also for the color of their clothing.
As I said previously, I’ve observed that many digital cameras have a tendency to amplify skin color.
This is why, in addition to the white balance issue I’ve just outlined, I often reduce the saturation of skin during post processing when making portrait photos so as to achieve a more pleasing result.
If you don’t post process your photos your camera will, most likely, have a series of options to influence the way the image is processed prior to it be converted to a JPEG file in camera. You’ll find these options listed under Picture Style on a Canon camera and under Picture Control on a Nikon camera.
Needless to say, when photographing portraits, you’ll want to choose the portrait setting which will process the image file in such a way so as to produce a less saturated (i.e., less colorful), lower contrast and less sharp result than would be the case with the Landscape option. Most portraits will benefit from this approach.
Warm color balance illuminates my hotel at sunrise in Ilulissat, Greenland.
The Advantage Of Auto White Balance?
Most folks leave their camera on the Auto White Balance setting simply because they either don't want to have to think about such things when making photos or they don't know any better.
There are others who prefer to trust their camera knowing that they can tweak the results on the desktop.
Under most circumstances that notion is probably reasonable for folks working in RAW, but not at all a good idea for anyone photographing in JPEG mode.
That's because white balance is basically baked into a JPEG image and, while you can adjust white balance on the desktop, you may not be able to completely neutralize or fix poor white balance on a JPEG file.
This is true whether the color balance resulted from a poor choice made by the camera, when set to Auto White Balance, or from an incorrect manual white balance adjustment made, in camera, by the photographer.
There are times when Auto White Balance (i.e., AWB) makes sense, for both RAW and JPEG photographers.
For example, if the correct white balance setting is somewhere in between Daylight and Cloudy or Cloudy and Shade then AWB will likely find the appropriate white balance, defined in Kelvin Degrees or Degrees Kelvin.
Likewise, when photographing under mixed lighting conditions (e.g., Incandescent and Fluorescent, Daylight and Incandescent) it's sometimes possible your camera's Auto White Balance will produce an acceptable result.
What matters most is that, when you’re not happy with the color balance that’s resulted by setting your camera to AWB, you’re able to take action to resolve the problem. Options available to you would likely include one or more of the following:
Manually select a more appropriate white balance
Turn off the interior lighting so that you’re only dealing with the light coming from outside
Close the blinds so that you’re only dealing with the artificial light available to you indoors
When photographing indoors with more than one type of artificial light, switch all but one type of light source off so that you’re only dealing with one color of light
Reducing the different types of light sources will help minimize the different color temperatures you’ll likely be photographing under. That should enable your camera to produce a more neutral color balance so that the color of objects within the scene photograph as expected.
However, there will be times when the variety of light sources and the different colors of light they emit will produce a really interesting image. In that case start with your camera set to Sunny/Daylight/Direct Daylight.
From there it’s easy to manually change your camera’s white balance to produce a warmer or cooler color rendering, depending upon your needs.
Midnight sun contrasts the color balance of the Ilulissat town and cemetery.
JPEG And The Problem With Auto White Balance
However, we're not always wanting to neutralize the color of the light. Sometimes we're trying to embrace it, as was the case with this image of a cemetery overlooked by houses and factories in the tourist town of Ilulissat in West Greenland.
It’s quite a surreal scene which, while interesting from a documentary point of view, is also about how the color of the light affects the color of subject matter within the scene.
It’s important to remember that the color of light may be the primary reason we make some of the our photos.
Think of a spectacular sunrise. How could your camera possibly know you're photographing a sunrise, unless you set it to one of those insane camera presets (called Scene Selection Mode in some cameras).
I really dislike those presets because they take away your ability to manually adjust your image in camera. For example, they often stop you from overriding the cameras often inaccurate exposure, leaving you with an image that’s either too light or too dark.
“Your camera has no idea whether you’re photographing a broom, a bar mitzvah or a birthday cake.”
So when would you actually use the Sunny/Daylight/Direct Daylight white balance?
When you want to record the color that's actually there. That's why the Sunny while balance setting is often my starting point for photographing the city at night, an amazing sunrise or a beautiful sunset.
This approach should stop your camera, not knowing it's a sunset or that you're wanting to record the color of those neon lights, from trying to neutralize the color of the light.
It's exactly the same scenario when there's a nice mix of warm and cool colored light within the same scene, as was the case with the photo of the cemetery in Ilulissat, Greenland directly above.
That photo was made on Daylight white balance, but not because it was daylight.
Take a look at the hills in the background of that photo. On one side they're bluish and on the other side they're reddish. Correcting or neutralizing one color would have amplified the other.
And, in any case, the contrast between those two colors helps to separate, both visually and emotionally, those areas of the image.
Conclusion: Color Balance Final Thoughts
If, like me, you do decide to set your camera to Cloudy as the default for much of your outdoor photography, don't forget to change your white balance when working under predominantly Incandescent (i.e., Tungsten) lighting.
Otherwise you'll end up with an image displaying an extremely orange color cast.
The same is true when photographing under fluorescent lighting, though the actual color of light emitted from the light source will vary from one type (e.g., white, cool white, warm white) of fluorescent tube to the next.
Whether you end up preferring Cloudy or Sunny/Daylight/Direct Daylight as your preferred default white balance for outdoor photography is up to you. Ultimately it’s going to depend upon the kind of photos you create, the conditions under which you create them and your own personal preference for how colors are rendered in the photos you make.
I’ve covered a lot of information in this post. It’s going to take some time and practice to fully get your head around the white balance settings in your camera and how they’ll allow you to control color balance in a photo.
Once you do you’ll be able to neutralize, embrace or shift the color of light to achieve a result that best matches your own artistic intent.
I hope this article helps, though I suspect it’s one you’ll need to read several times before all the information makes sense. Needless to say theory is only the beginning. We can’t really master concepts such as color balance without spending considerable time out and about actually making photos.
If you live in or around Melbourne, Australia and you'd like to catch up for a private one to one photography class you can contact me here.
